Linux 5.15 To Fix Regression In Its Floppy Disk Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.15 To Fix Regression In Its Floppy Disk Driver

Near the beginning of the year was some rare work on Linux's floppy disk driver and -- a half-year later -- it was found out that not only do people with systems using floppy disks still move to newer kernels, but that work earlier in the year had regressed the Linux kernel's floppy disk handling. Now coming for Linux 5.15 is a fix...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Floppy-Disk-Linux-5.15-Fix

[tildearrow]

Dang... I remember when installing openSUSE to a machine that still had a "floppy controller", and it would never boot until I realized I had to disable fhe floppy controller in BIOS...

[doomie]

And people were sneering at optical media... (seriously though, pressed discs are pretty good)

[Brisse]

No one likes a sloppy floppy disk driver.

[linner]

Last time I had to use a floppy was about 5 years ago when I upgraded an old oscilloscope's firmware. Good thing I keep a few floppy drives handy because the one in the oscilloscope was broken and I had to hack in an old laptop drive. Also I had to go through like 20 floppy disks before I found one that would format and reliably store data (I think it was actually an old AOL disk, ha).

[domih]

Hopefully the kernel people will one day fix both the punched cards and smoke signals drivers.

[pipe13]

Last time I had to use a floppy was about 5 years ago when I upgraded an old oscilloscope's firmware. Good thing I keep a few floppy drives handy because the one in the oscilloscope was broken and I had to hack in an old laptop drive. Also I had to go through like 20 floppy disks before I found one that would format and reliably store data (I think it was actually an old AOL disk, ha).

And here just last week I tossed several hundred of the damn things -- most of them brand new and never used. Now you tell me they were worth real money. Who knew?

[tildearrow]

Hopefully the kernel people will one day fix both the punched cards and smoke signals drivers.

Smoke machines don't need drivers. An Arduino and MIDI/OSC should be enough (both are upstream and not broken).

[White Wolf]

Still holding old Commodore c-64(tape+floppy5,25) and Amiga600(with floppy) for my son when he will grown up I will get him interested in computer science and those will be for learning purposes Pentium III 450MHz with a Riva tnt and cd-rom (x4 speed? dont' remember it anymore) also there

[Teggs]

If I understand correctly, it was the same commit five years apart, same result five years apart? As penance, someone should be given homework to make the patch do what they intend it to do without breaking something.

I like the maintainer's response, though.